Isaiah takes the house of bondage and the rod of God’s anger — Egypt and Assyria, the two worst names in Israel’s memory — and ends the oracle by calling one of them “my people” and the other “the work of my hands.” Then he spends three years walking barefoot to make a point about who you lean on.
A study in Isaiah 19-20 · Arthur Baldwin · StandUp4Jesus.Org · 17 min read
The Burden Of Egypt
“The burden of Egypt. Behold, the LORD rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt: and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at his presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst of it.”
Isaiah 19:1
No nation carried more weight in Israel’s memory than this one, and the weight ran in two directions at once.
Egypt was the house of bondage. It was also, for four centuries afterward, the standing temptation — the place you sent to when things got difficult, because Egypt had grain when the harvest failed and horses when the army was short. Every prophet in the Old Testament has to deal with somebody in Jerusalem who has worked out that an Egyptian alliance would solve the immediate problem.
So the opening image is chosen with care. The LORD rideth upon a swift cloud, and shall come into Egypt. He arrives; the idols move. That verb is quietly withering — the gods of the oldest and most confident religion on earth react to His arrival the way furniture reacts to an earthquake.
The Egyptians Against The Egyptians
“And I will set the Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his brother, and every one against his neighbour; city against city, and kingdom against kingdom. And the spirit of Egypt shall fail in the midst thereof; and I will destroy the counsel thereof: and they shall seek to the idols, and to the charmers, and to them that have familiar spirits, and to the wizards.”
Isaiah 19:2, 3
The judgment on Egypt is not an invasion. Nobody crosses the border in these verses. Egypt is set against itself, and the sequence runs inward: brother, neighbor, city, kingdom.
Then the spirit of Egypt shall fail — the nerve goes — and the response to that failure is the interesting part. They do not reform. They consult. The idols, and the charmers, and them that have familiar spirits, and the wizards: four kinds of specialist, and every one of them a supplier of information.
Isaiah has used that list once already, and it was aimed at his own people: “And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead?” (Isaiah 8:19). The same reflex, in Jerusalem and in Memphis. When the counsel fails, both nations go looking for someone who claims to know the future, and the prophet’s question to both is the same one.
The Waters Shall Fail From The Sea
“And the waters shall fail from the sea, and the river shall be wasted and dried up… The paper reeds by the brooks, by the mouth of the brooks, and every thing sown by the brooks, shall wither, be driven away, and be no more. The fishers also shall mourn, and all they that cast angle into the brooks shall lament, and they that spread nets upon the waters shall languish. Moreover they that work in fine flax, and they that weave networks, shall be confounded.”
Isaiah 19:5, 7-9
Isaiah goes for the river, because Egypt is the river. Take the Nile away and the country is the Sahara with a memory.
What follows is an economy being taken apart in the correct order, and the detail is that of a man who had thought about how a country actually works. First the water. Then the reeds — including the paper reeds, the papyrus, which was Egypt’s writing material and one of its exports. Then the fishermen, named by method: the ones with hooks and the ones with nets, two different trades. Then the flax workers and the weavers, because flax grows in wet ground and linen was what Egypt sold.
Nobody is killed in these five verses. Everybody is put out of work. And it is worth noticing that the God who is doing this is the same one who once turned this river to blood in front of a Pharaoh — Egypt has seen what happens when its water is touched, and had a thousand years to think about it.
The Princes Of Zoan Are Fools
“Surely the princes of Zoan are fools, the counsel of the wise counsellors of Pharaoh is become brutish: how say ye unto Pharaoh, I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings? Where are they? where are thy wise men? and let them tell thee now, and let them know what the LORD of hosts hath purposed upon Egypt.”
Isaiah 19:11, 12
The wisdom of Egypt was proverbial. When the Bible wants to say that Solomon was wise, it says his wisdom exceeded Egypt’s; when it wants to establish Moses’ education, it says he was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. This was the oldest continuous intellectual tradition in the world, and it knew it.
Isaiah’s attack on it is not that the counsellors are ignorant. It is that they are credentialled. I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings — the boast is entirely about inheritance and pedigree, which is what a tradition falls back on when it has stopped producing anything. And the test Isaiah sets is brutally simple: let them tell thee now. Say something about what is coming. Any tradition can explain the past.
Then verse 14, which is the least dignified sentence in the book: “The LORD hath mingled a perverse spirit in the midst thereof: and they have caused Egypt to err in every work thereof, as a drunken man staggereth in his vomit.” The government of the wisest nation on earth, reeling, slipping in its own mess, unable to walk a straight line. That is what the counsel of the ancient wise men has come to.
The Language Of Canaan
“In that day shall five cities in the land of Egypt speak the language of Canaan, and swear to the LORD of hosts; one shall be called, The city of destruction.”
Isaiah 19:18
And now, five times in seven verses, the phrase in that day — and everything reverses.
Egyptian cities speaking the language of Canaan is not a prediction about linguistics. It is the way you say that a people has come over — that they have taken up the speech in which this God is worshipped, and are now swearing their oaths by Him. Five cities: a small number, and a real one, which is Isaiah’s habit. He counted the berries on the olive tree too.
The name at the end of the verse is one of the genuinely hard readings in the book, and it is worth being straight about it: the Hebrew here differs between manuscripts, and translations divide between the city of destruction and the city of the sun — the latter being Heliopolis, the great center of Egyptian sun worship. Both readings are ancient. Nothing in the argument of the chapter turns on which is right, and a reader who finds the two in different Bibles has found a real difference, not an error.
An Altar In The Midst Of Egypt
“In that day shall there be an altar to the LORD in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar at the border thereof to the LORD. And it shall be for a sign and for a witness unto the LORD of hosts in the land of Egypt: for they shall cry unto the LORD because of the oppressors, and he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them.”
Isaiah 19:19, 20
Stop and let the sentence be as strange as it is. An altar to the LORD, in the middle of Egypt.
Everything about the arrangement Isaiah lived under said this could not happen. There was one altar, in one city, on one mountain. The whole of Deuteronomy insists on it. And here is a prophet of that system saying that a day is coming when there will be an altar in the land his ancestors were slaves in, and God will regard it.
Then verse 20 repeats the Exodus, with the roles moved. They shall cry unto the LORD because of the oppressors — that is the exact language of Exodus 2, where the children of Israel cried by reason of their bondage and God heard. But the ones crying now are Egyptians, and the oppressor is somebody else.
And the answer is the same answer: he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them. The word covers the judges God raised up to rescue Israel; it covers Moses. Egypt is going to get one of its own.
He Shall Smite And Heal It
“And the LORD shall be known to Egypt, and the Egyptians shall know the LORD in that day… And the LORD shall smite Egypt: he shall smite and heal it: and they shall return even to the LORD, and he shall be intreated of them, and shall heal them.”
Isaiah 19:21, 22
Five words in the middle of verse 22 carry more doctrine than most chapters: he shall smite and heal it.
Not smite or heal, depending on the mood or the century. Not smite some and heal others. The same hand does both, to the same patient, in that order — and the order is not accidental, because Egypt does not come looking for a physician until it has been struck. Hosea puts it as a decision the people make: “Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up” (Hosea 6:1). Same sequence, same confidence about who is on the other end of it.
This is the answer to a question people carry around about the God of the Old Testament, and Isaiah answers it inside a single verse rather than by argument. The smiting in chapter 19 was real and He did it. The healing in chapter 19 is real and He does that too, to the same nation, and He is intreated of them — which means they asked and He listened.
A Highway Out Of Egypt To Assyria
“In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians.”
Isaiah 19:23
There was already a road between Egypt and Assyria. It ran up the coast through Philistia and across the Jezreel valley, and it was the most fought-over strip of ground in the ancient world — the route every army took in either direction, which is the entire reason Israel spent its history being marched over. Israel’s misfortune was to be the corridor between the two.
Isaiah says the road stays and the traffic changes. The Assyrian goes down into Egypt and the Egyptian comes up into Assyria, and not one word about armies. The invasion route becomes a trade route, and the two superpowers serve together — the word is the one used for worship.
Blessed Be Egypt My People
“In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land: Whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.”
Isaiah 19:24, 25
This is the summit of the chapter and one of the most startling verses in the Old Testament, and the shock is in the titles.
Blessed be Egypt my people. That phrase belonged to Israel. It is the covenant formula — I will be their God, and they shall be my people — and Isaiah hands it to the nation that kept Israel in slavery for four hundred years.
Assyria the work of my hands. That is creation language, used of what God makes and is pleased with. And it is said of the empire He called the rod of mine anger nine chapters ago — the axe that boasted against the one who swung it.
And Israel mine inheritance. Notice that Israel is not demoted and not displaced. Israel keeps a title of its own, and a particularly intimate one. What Israel loses is exclusivity, and only that.
Count the order, too: Egypt first, Assyria second, Israel third. Isaiah says so outright — Israel shall be the third with Egypt and with Assyria. Any Judean hearing this in the eighth century BC would have needed a moment.
And this is not a stray verse. It is where the whole book has been going since chapter 2, when the nations began flowing up the mountain, and since chapter 11, when the ensign was raised and the Gentiles came to it. The covenant was never a fence. Paul spent his life arguing this from the Old Testament and getting called a traitor for it, and the text he needed was sitting in Isaiah 19 the entire time.
Naked And Barefoot Three Years
“In the year that Tartan came unto Ashdod, (when Sargon the king of Assyria sent him,) and fought against Ashdod, and took it; At the same time spake the LORD by Isaiah the son of Amoz, saying, Go and loose the sackcloth from off thy loins, and put off thy shoe from thy foot. And he did so, walking naked and barefoot.”
Isaiah 20:1, 2
Chapter 20 is eight verses of prose, and it is the strangest thing Isaiah is ever asked to do.
First the date, which is unusually precise even for him: the year the Assyrian commander took Ashdod, on Sargon’s orders. It is worth mentioning that for a long time this verse was the only place in any surviving document where the name Sargon appeared, and it was treated as evidence that the Bible had invented a king. Then in the eighteen-forties his palace was dug up in northern Iraq, with his annals on the walls, including the campaign against Ashdod. The verse had been right and the objection was retired.
Then the instruction. Isaiah is told to take off the sackcloth — the coarse garment prophets wore — and his sandals, and to go about like that. The word rendered naked in Hebrew usually means stripped to an undergarment rather than wholly unclothed, but nobody should soften this: it is the appearance of a prisoner of war, and it is the appearance of humiliation, and he is told to carry it in public in the capital city.
For three years.
We are told nothing about how that went. Nothing about his household, or what was said in the street, or what it cost him. The text records the command, the compliance in four words — and he did so — and the meaning.
“Like as my servant Isaiah hath walked naked and barefoot three years for a sign and wonder upon Egypt and upon Ethiopia; So shall the king of Assyria lead away the Egyptians prisoners, and the Ethiopians captives, young and old, naked and barefoot”
Isaiah 20:3, 4
The prophet becomes the message. Judah is negotiating with Egypt, and rather than another oracle God puts a walking exhibit of the outcome in front of them for three years: this is what your allies are going to look like.
And note the cost distribution, because it is the pattern of this book. The nation that will not listen is comfortable. The man who has nothing to do with the policy carries the sign on his own body. Ezekiel will be asked for something similar; Hosea will be asked for worse.
How Shall We Escape?
“And they shall be afraid and ashamed of Ethiopia their expectation, and of Egypt their glory. And the inhabitant of this isle shall say in that day, Behold, such is our expectation, whither we flee for help to be delivered from the king of Assyria: and how shall we escape?”
Isaiah 20:5, 6
Two words carry the chapter: expectation and glory. That is what Egypt and Ethiopia had become to the people of Judah — not merely allies but the thing they expected to be saved by, and the thing they were proud of having secured.
And the closing line is not repentance. Read it carefully. Behold, such is our expectation… and how shall we escape? That is the sound of a policy collapsing, and of men discovering they have no second plan — not the sound of anybody turning round. Isaiah leaves the question hanging and does not answer it here.
He has already answered it twice, though. Chapter 19 said the answer for Egypt was an altar. Chapter 18 said God’s stillness was ripening, not absence. The escape was never going to come from the south.
The Child Who Went Down Into Egypt
One last thing, and it belongs at the end of an oracle about Egypt.
Seven hundred years after Isaiah promised an altar in the midst of the land of Egypt and a saviour sent to the people who cried there, a family from Bethlehem went down that same road in the dark, running from a king who was killing children.
“When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.”
Matthew 2:14, 15
Egypt sheltered Him. The house of bondage, the place you were not supposed to go back to, the nation whose river once ran with the blood of its own judgment — that is where the Saviour of the world was kept safe as an infant, because Israel was not safe.
Isaiah said God would smite Egypt and heal it, would put an altar in the middle of it, would call it my people. He did not live to see how far that would go. But the sentence he wrote — he shall send them a saviour, and a great one, and he shall deliver them — turned out to be about a person, and that person spent His first years on Egyptian ground.
